– Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The highly intelligent Michael Gibson emails me:
Not sure if it’s worth an assorted link link, but we’re giving out $1k grants to students home from campus who want to work on ideas to mitigate the effects of the crisis. People can pitch ideas here:
Are You An Artist And Need Help?
New York Foundation for the Arts has created a page of resources for artists who have found themselves in difficulty during the virus crisis. – New York Foundation for the Arts
Arts industry seeks $850 million rescue package
Australia's
leading arts organisations have met state and federal representatives
to express the urgent need for emergency funding to stop the industry
from collapsing.
Life Feels Tenuous, So Here’s A List Of Fun Books To Read For Distraction And Joy
Also, to keep you away from the world of crowded bars or restaurants. Seriously, don’t do it. Instead, why not start a series like the many, many-volumed Discworld of Terry Pratchett? (Yes, your library is probably closed or closing, so you’ll have to get these books by e-reader or delivery, but still.) – The Guardian (UK)
Why do American cemeteries look the way they do? The answer lies in a 19th-century passion for rural, rustic design... American cemeteries
It takes a special sort of skill to represent an underclass in fiction. There is the difficulty of knowing the subject well enough, and having the empathy to represent the sub-culture fairly and without being judgemental. And then there is the problem of writing the story so that it engages the better-off, the ones most likely to buy the book. Authors take on this task because, it seems to me, that they want to bring attention to the inequities that bedevil society. All the way from 19th century authors like Charles Dickens and Émile Zola; to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle(1906); John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939); James Kelmann’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994) and Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010). Closer to home there are the great chroniclers of the Depression: Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) and Kylie Tennant’s The Battlers (1941), and more recently Paddy O’Reilly’s The Fine Colour of Rust (2012) writing about a single mother in a depressed country town. All these authors have cared about the lives of the poor, the dispossessed, and the forgotten, and have used the power of the pen to draw attention to the essential humanity of the underclass.
The Blessed Rita, by Tommy Wieringa, translated by Sam Garrett
The book changed me. Suddenly the rumours and whispers about the dark past and the undercurrents of dissidents became more audible and meaningful. I slowly began to read more of the samizdat and tamizdat (Russian books published abroad) literature.
I also began to pick up the double entrendres in the speech of my Russian friends. A rupture appeared between the Russian I had been taught and the Russian I heard. This brought a feeling of uneasiness, but it also made me realise the power with which language can do its job and say the unsayable. (p.103)
Spinoza’s Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets, by Subhash Jaireth
We are an intensely social species, and often a rivalrous one, prone to measuring ourselves in terms of others, and often directly against others. Accordingly, relative position matters to our sense of wellbeing, although excluded from standard economic models that look only at the utility derived from own consumption of commodities plus leisure. For example, people can have deep-seated psychological responses to inequality and social hierarchy, creating the potential for extreme wealth differences to invoked feelings of superiority and inferiority, or dominance and subordination, that may powerfully affect how we relate to each other.
Penguins FREE at CHICAGO AQUARIUM – LOCKDOWN MEME YouTube
Why Birds Are the World’s Best Engineers NYT. I wonder if the dinosaurs built nests. Some did!
Daniel Shaviro (NYU), Literature and Inequality: Nine Perspectives from the Napoleonic Era Through the First Gilded Age (Anthem Press 2020):
The tools that one needs to understand how and why this matters include the sociological and the qualitative. I use the particular tool of in-depth studies of particular classic works of literature (from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice through Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier and The Titan) that offer suggestive insights regarding the felt experiences around high-end inequality at different times and from different perspectives.
Penguins FREE at CHICAGO AQUARIUM – LOCKDOWN MEME YouTube
Why Birds Are the World’s Best Engineers NYT. I wonder if the dinosaurs built nests. Some did!